redistricting

Claiming illegal political motives, attorneys for Republicans are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to void the lines drawn by the Independent Redistricting Commission for the state’s 30 legislative districts.

A bid by state lawmakers to take back the power to draw congressional lines is legally flawed and should be rejected, the lead attorney for the Independent Redistricting Commission told the nation’s high court.

A federal three-judge panel ruled that the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission does not have to redraw any portion of its legislative district map, rejecting the claims from Republican challengers who that alleged the map violated the one-person-one-vote principle.

Arizonans tired of the politics surrounding the once-a-decade legislative and congressional redistricting process voted to pull the job from the Legislature in 2000 and give it to an independent commission.
But getting politics out of the high-stakes game has proven difficult.

A panel of three federal judges has dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit brought against Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission. The suit challenged the underlying legal premise of the commission itself.

Tax filings from a “dark money” organization run by an Arizona political consultant helped shed some light on the three-year old question of who funded a Republican redistricting group known as FAIR Trust.

The Governor’s Office said it doesn’t believe a special session is needed to provide more funding to the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, which warned that it won’t have enough money to pay its legal bills through the end of the year and may sue if it can’t get more money before January.